John T. Reed’s news blog

WSJ today has a big article on how much savings seniors have and how much they should have. As we often here, the amount they gave is generally not enough. They should have 15% a year starting at age 25..Give me a break. Extremely few people did that or could have..The article makes no mention of home equity. I thought that home equity was seniors main net worth category. But when I was writing my principal residence book, I checked.. For people with 401(k)s, THAT was their biggest net worth component; home equity was second. For others, home equity was...

It is easy to demonstrate its cost effectiveness. Look at the sale prices of unstaged homes or condos and staged homes or condos with the same floorplan in the same building or development. . My Sunday paper today has a big article about a staging company named Revive. The owner says sellers who do not use his services leave 15% to 20% of the home value on the table. That’s a lot. So prove it. They charge $80,000 to $160,000! Jesus H. Christ on a crutch! . Do they proves it works? Not in the article. He says it adds...

A gold article in today’s WSJ makes two statements that I need to address. . Second column in the article says that stocks “offer some intrinsic inflation protection” because business can raise prices and benefit from growth of the real economy. . Total Bulls***! When a nation gets hyperinflation, the federal government immediately passes what I call the Five Bad Laws: capital controls, price controls, rationing, anti-hoarding laws, and financial repression laws. . Sports fans, publicly-traded companies are not going to be matching inflation rates with price increases during hyperinflation because of price controls. . Duh. . And growth of...

I spent about a year and a half reading all the great books of stock and bonds investing. I was not trying to be a stock or bond guy. Rather, I noticed that each of the various investment fields including gambling and insurance had strengths and weaknesses.  .My main field is real estate investment by mom and pop millionaires. That is, not institutional real estate (Trump stuff). Real estate investors suck at risk management. Stock and bonds guys are better at it and insurance is great at it. Real estate is great at letting you manage the business. Behavioral economics...

I just calculated the real (adjusted for inflation) long-term average value of silver since 1969. I eliminated 1980 because the Hunt Brothers tried to corner the market in silver. That caused it to hit an all-time record price of $50.35 on March 2, 1980. . That is not going to happen again because the Comex exchange changed their rules to discourage it. The brothers were also found civilly liable and had to compensate for conspiracy against another silver trader, went bankrupt, and lost a billion dollars. So that was a one-off anomaly. . So the average price over that period...